Winners of DAB's 2015 Best Student Presentation Awards

Thank you to all of the students who participated in the 2015 Best Student Presentation competitions! We had an excellent panel of seven speakers in the special session for the DAB Best Student Oral Presentation, and an impressive group of 32 compete for DAB Best Student Poster.

This year's Best Student Oral Presentation Award went to graduate student Gavin Leighton for his talk titled, "Genomic relatedness predicts investment in a public good." Gavin is a graduate student at the University of Miami in the lab of William Searcy, and the work he presented at SICB focused on cooperative nests construction in weavers.

Robin Costello, a first-year graduate student from the University of Virginia, won the Best Student Poster Presentation with her poster titled, "Effects of anthropogenic noise on male signaling behavior and female phonotaxis in Oecanthus tree crickets." The work Robin presented at SICB reported her results from her undergraduate thesis at Dartmouth College, in collaboration with graduate student Laurel Symes.
DAB is one of the three Divisions that may also choose to award the Adrian Wenner Award for Strong Inference, and this year Brent Stoffer was selected for this honor for his talk, "Experience matters: the effects of the social environment on mate choice plasticity in a wolf spider." Brent is a graduate student in George Uetz's lab at the University of Cincinnati.

Congratulations to each of these winners, and a big thanks to all of the judges for your hard work in evaluating student talks and posters! We couldn't offer these awards without your help!

Meetings

The 22nd Annual Animal Behavior Conference at Indiana University abstract deadline is quickly approaching. Registration for non-presenting attendees will be accepted until March 22, 2015. This year the conference runs from Thursday March 26 to Saturday March 28.

We will have opportunities for people to present posters at the poster session on Friday evening and to present oral presentations at both the main meeting on Friday and the communication symposium on Thursday. This conference is a particularly good opportunity for undergraduates to present their research.

All the information about the conference can be found at the link above. And registration for the conference is FREE!